Category: Features

April 18, 2017 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Earlier this month, there was a snippet of news in the film press about the Oscars. At first glance, it seems a technicality, but it could be serious, very serious, for any fan of animation beyond Hollywood. It’s about the way the nominees for Best Animated Feature Film are chosen – the […]

April 15, 2017 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale, the newest instalment of the Sword Art Online franchise (and the film is all–new, barring some brief flashbacks) was first announced in Japan in October 2015. Weirdly, it has already predicted the future. In the summer of the following year, anyone in a big Tokyo park like […]

April 14, 2017 · 0 comments

Norio Shioyama, who died with his wife Tokiko in a house fire yesterday, was first and foremost an illustrator, dragged unceremoniously into the anime world by the staffing demands of the industry’s boom-time. He was born in Kumamoto, the third of seven children of a sugar wholesaler, and passed his early years in the firm […]

April 12, 2017 · 0 comments

by Jeremy Clarke. Weighing in at a lengthy two and a half hours, this lavish, sexually-explicit, South Korean pot-boiler is based on Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith, but moves the location from Victorian England to Japanese colonial-era Korea.

April 9, 2017 · 1 comment

By Jasper Sharp. At the end of February, the National Film Center of Tokyo opened its ‘Japanese Animated Film Classics’ online archive to celebrate this year’s centenary of Japanese animation. The site, which features 64 films from the pre-war and wartime period, features many films with English subtitles. It is a wonderful initiative from the […]